Take the work out of work

“We need to create work environments that are as immersive and involving as the best video games.”

Human beings are most productive when work feels like play. Enthusiasm, imagination and resourcefulness—the critical ingredients for success in the creative economy—get unleashed when people are having fun. In the future, the most successful organizations will be the ones that have figured out how to blur the boundary between vocation and avocation. Among other things, this will require organizations to better align personal interests and professional responsibilities, to take the drudgery out of work, and to grant employees more control over what they work on.

Take the work out of work

“We need to create work environments that are as immersive and involving as the best video games.”

Human beings are most productive when work feels like play. Enthusiasm, imagination and resourcefulness—the critical ingredients for success in the creative economy—get unleashed when people are having fun. In the future, the most successful organizations will be the ones that have figured out how to blur the boundary between vocation and avocation. Among other things, this will require organizations to better align personal interests and professional responsibilities, to take the drudgery out of work, and to grant employees more control over what they work on.

The Morning Star Company is one of the world’s leading processors of tomatoes—and one of the most progressive models of a self-managed enterprise we’ve seen. In this Mashup session, Paul Green, the co-founder of the Self-Management Institute and, until recently, Morning Star’s head of development, describes the company’s extraordinary—and extraordinarily effective—approach to replacing manager-management with peer- and self-management.

The founders of TopCoder and Tongal, the world's largest communities of talented and impassioned software developers and digital creators, make the case for the value of “creative populism,” share the new rules for activating, enlisting, and organizing talent in the social, mobile and digital age—and unpack their disruptive models for the future of work and value creation.